Her brain remained swollen and nonresponsive; she never regained consciousness. Her friends and family kept a vigil at her side for forty-eight hours until the family decided to let her go gracefully. Her organs will be harvested for donation and I think there is great poetry in that.

Thank you, especially, to the NICU staff at the phenomenal UAB hospital. Thank you for giving us all open access to her, for letting us gather to sing and whisper and pray over her, for letting us prop her family up unencumbered and even doing it with a sense of welcome. You were so very good to our friends and your humanity helped more than the constraints of simple words will allow me to convey.

It’s pretty safe to refer to me as a gutsy girl. I’m not an especially fearful person. I have, pretty much, exactly one fear (and it is fairly crippling after a fashion): That fear is that some harm might come to one of my children. The losses of the past two years, they are marching up closer and closer and I’m a nervous fucking wreck right now.

I know the fear well – not only because I am now the father of teenagers, but because as a teenager myself I lived the exact scene you describe in the hospital room of my friend who’s parents made a similar, heart-wrenching decision to let him go. “Sorry” doesn’t seem enough, but it’s all I have.